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POLYN Technology says its VibroSense tyre monitoring technology can improve ABS braking performance by up to 12% by supplying information about tyre-road friction. Beyond the headline figure, the development points towards a potentially important change in vehicle dynamics: after decades of tyres being developed to work with electronic controls, the tyre could increasingly provide information those systems use.
Anti-lock braking systems changed the relationship between tyres and vehicle dynamics. As ABS became commonplace, followed by Electronic Stability Control, tyre engineers increasingly had to consider how tread patterns, compounds and construction would behave alongside electronic systems designed to manage braking and stability.
POLYN Technology's VibroSense development potentially starts sending useful information in the opposite direction.
The company says supplying tyre-road friction information from VibroSense to ABS can improve braking performance by up to 12%. The technology is not intended to increase the tyre's intrinsic mechanical grip. Instead, its potential advantage comes from giving the vehicle additional information about the grip already available at the tyre-road interface, potentially allowing the control system to use it more effectively.
If that performance can be reproduced across the range of tyres, surfaces and operating conditions required for production vehicles, the implications extend beyond another incremental improvement in tyre monitoring. It would demonstrate that information generated at the tyre-road interface can contribute directly to the performance of a vehicle safety system.
The technical challenge is considerable. Tyre vibration produces a complex, high-frequency stream of data, while any sensor operating inside a tyre faces tight constraints around processing power, battery life and wireless communications.
POLYN's approach is to process much of that information locally rather than continuously transmitting raw vibration data elsewhere in the vehicle.
Its neuromorphic architecture uses an autoencoder to extract useful features from the vibration signal and convert them into a much lower-dimensional representation. POLYN says this can reduce the amount of data requiring wireless transmission by more than 1,000 times, from megabits to kilobits, allowing narrower-bandwidth communications with lower energy requirements.
The company's white paper puts typical power consumption for its Neuromorphic Front End at around 100 microwatts. That potentially allows long-life battery operation or energy-harvesting designs, an important consideration if intelligent tyre sensing is to move beyond prototypes into practical vehicle applications.
The architecture is not tyre-specific. POLYN describes vibration analysis applications ranging from bearings and gearboxes to electric motors, wind turbines and car tyres. For smart tyres specifically, it identifies road-condition detection, tyre-grip control, structural-integrity monitoring and tread-condition assessment as potential applications.
That helps explain why vibration processing could matter to ABS.
Conventional ABS responds to information about vehicle and wheel behaviour as braking develops. If a controller can also receive a credible estimate of available tyre-road friction, it potentially gains another piece of information with which to determine its braking strategy.
The potential advantage is therefore not additional grip, but earlier or better knowledge of the grip available.
That distinction creates a more interesting question for tyre manufacturers than the headline percentage alone.
For decades, tyre developers have worked knowing that ABS, ESC and increasingly sophisticated chassis systems will respond to what happens at the contact patch. Tread design, compounds, construction and transient behaviour all influence the forces those electronic systems ultimately have to manage.
An intelligent tyre capable of estimating friction introduces another variable.
The tyre-road interaction generates vibration. Processing at the tyre extracts useful information from that signal. A friction estimate can then become an input to the vehicle controller, which can potentially use it when deciding how to intervene.
In other words, the tyre potentially moves from being solely the component through which the control system manages available grip towards becoming one of the sources telling the vehicle how much grip is available.
That does not mean tyre manufacturers will redesign compounds or tread patterns because of VibroSense, and the available evidence does not support making that claim. The immediate benefit could sit largely within ABS and chassis-control calibration.
But it does create an engineering question that becomes increasingly relevant as intelligent tyre technology develops: what constitutes an ABS-optimised tyre when the tyre itself can provide information about the contact patch?
If direct friction information becomes sufficiently accurate and dependable, tyre and vehicle-control engineers could potentially optimise their respective systems more closely together. The tyre could then be evaluated not only for the mechanical performance it produces, but also for the consistency and usefulness of the information that can be extracted from its interaction with the road.
POLYN's own technical material highlights another important development issue.
The company describes the process of extracting lower-dimensional representations from vibration signals as broadly applicable to different mechanisms. However, its white paper also says the classifier interpreting those representations must be trained using datasets from the particular mechanism and its different operating modes.
That does not establish that VibroSense requires a separate bespoke calibration for every tyre. It does make transferability an important question for tyre and vehicle engineers.
Tyres differ significantly in construction, compound, tread design and stiffness. Their characteristics also change with wear, temperature, pressure and load. A vehicle may additionally spend much of its life on replacement tyres substantially different from its original-equipment fitment.
For friction information to become a dependable vehicle-control input, the system would therefore need to handle the variations relevant to its intended production application.
POLYN says its development work covers different tyres, vehicles and road surfaces. The company has also reported friction-estimation testing at the Applus IDIADA proving ground across dry and wet asphalt, dry and wet concrete and lower-friction surfaces representing winter conditions.
The longer-term challenge is not simply detecting differences between those surfaces. It is providing information sufficiently consistent for another vehicle system to act upon across the operating conditions that vehicle and tyre manufacturers need to validate.
POLYN says supplying VibroSense tyre-road friction information to ABS can improve braking performance by up to 12%. If that level of improvement can be achieved in production applications, it would provide a compelling demonstration of the value of giving vehicle-control systems more direct information about conditions at the tyre-road interface.
The significance lies in how the improvement is achieved. VibroSense is not intended to increase the tyre's mechanical grip, but to give the vehicle more information about the grip available. For ABS developers, earlier knowledge of tyre-road friction could potentially allow the control system to respond more appropriately to changing surface conditions and make better use of the tyre's available performance.
POLYN has already reported friction-estimation testing across different surfaces at the Applus IDIADA proving ground, while its wider development work covers different tyres, vehicles and road conditions. The next stage will be demonstrating how consistently the braking benefits can be reproduced as the technology moves through broader tyre and vehicle applications.
That will be particularly relevant to tyre manufacturers. Different constructions, compounds and tread patterns produce different vibration characteristics, while those characteristics can also change with wear, temperature, pressure and load. Understanding how friction estimation performs across those variables will help determine how readily intelligent tyre information can become part of production vehicle-control strategies.
For the tyre industry, however, the 12% figure already illustrates the potential prize. If information generated at the tyre can help ABS make better use of the grip available, intelligent tyres move beyond monitoring their own condition and towards actively contributing to vehicle performance.
The wider significance is that intelligent tyres are moving closer to the vehicle's control architecture.
Much of the early commercial case for connected tyres centred on pressure and temperature monitoring, followed by applications around maintenance, mileage, tyre condition and fleet efficiency. Those remain important, particularly in commercial vehicle operations.
Friction information feeding ABS, ESC, ADAS or other dynamic-control systems occupies a different position.
A pressure reading used to schedule tyre maintenance is valuable information. A friction estimate used to influence a braking intervention potentially becomes part of a safety-critical decision. That raises the requirements around accuracy, latency, robustness, validation and compatibility considerably.
It also broadens the group of companies involved. Intelligent tyre development increasingly intersects with semiconductor manufacturers, sensor developers, brake and chassis-control suppliers, vehicle manufacturers and software specialists alongside the tyre companies themselves.
Over time, that could make interoperability and standardisation important commercial questions. If a vehicle system comes to depend on information generated at the tyre, the industry will need to determine how that information remains dependable when tyres are worn, replaced or changed to another manufacturer's product.
Those aftermarket implications remain prospective. Production adoption and integration would have to come first, and there is no basis yet for assuming that future replacement tyres will require VibroSense-type functionality.
But the direction is commercially important because it potentially changes what constitutes tyre performance in an increasingly software-defined vehicle.
The 12% figure gives POLYN's development an eye-catching performance claim. The more consequential tyre-industry issue may be the information flow behind it.
ABS and ESC helped make electronic vehicle controls an important consideration in tyre development. Intelligent tyre technology now raises the prospect of tyres providing information that helps those systems operate.
POLYN's white paper provides a technical explanation for how that could become practical. Processing vibration locally can reduce the communications and power burden associated with extracting useful information from the contact patch, while the company explicitly identifies road-condition detection and tyre-grip control among the technology's smart-tyre applications.
POLYN's reported maximum 12% ABS improvement provides an indication of what that information could contribute when connected directly with vehicle-control systems. More broadly, VibroSense points towards a potentially important change in the relationship between tyres and electronic vehicle controls.
For decades, tyre engineers have worked on making tyres behave predictably with ABS, ESC and increasingly sophisticated chassis systems. Intelligent tyre technology creates the possibility of information flowing in the other direction, with the tyre helping the vehicle understand conditions at the contact patch.
That could make the next phase of smart tyre development about more than monitoring pressure, temperature or tyre condition. If tyre-derived friction information can help vehicle systems make better use of the grip available, the tyre becomes an increasingly active part of the vehicle's control architecture.
Tags: POLYN VibroSense, smart tyres, ABS braking, tyre friction sensor, intelligent tyres, tyre-road friction, connected tyres, ADAS, tyre grip control, OE tyre development
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